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identity, information literacy and professors as celebrities

So, in the infamous checklists we tell students “make sure you can tell who the author is, check their credentials, are they expert, are they scholarly?” as a necessary part of scholarly information evaluation, right? Well, wouldn’t you say that an assistant professor of history at Southern Baptist University would be well-qualified to talk about the historical implications of the current President?

Wood also tells the story of what he did, and what others might do, to prevent and contain similar situations. This line really jumped out at me –

Moreover, this incident has led me to reconsider my somewhat adversarial relationship with technology. (I’m the guy who still refuses to buy a cell phone.) But one of the greatest difficulties I encountered in all of this was finding a platform from which to launch a rebuttal.

Using that space, Wood directly links this back to the information literacy skills we do talk about a lot as well –

To navigate those potential pitfalls, historians check facts and look for other documents that conform (or contradict) the information found in our source. We seek to identify the author and understand his or her motives for writing. We try to understand the larger historical and cultural context surrounding a document. By doing our homework, we’re better able to judge when something or someone deserves to be “taken at their word.”

This episode has taught me that these skills have an important place even outside this history classroom.

(Full disclosure, I haven’t read the essay in question, so I’m not sure how aligned the content is with the scholarly research of the professor in question, but I do think that for most students brand-new to thinking about what academic expertise means “professor of history” would probably be enough to establish credibility)

And in this case, when you figure out who the author is, you’re not done evaluating either. Does the work match other work by the author – does it fit within their normal research agenda – is it part of a scholarly/expert consensus, or is the interpretation more on the whacked-out side? That’s what this story has me thinking about – how to get students from “professor of history” to “there’s something seriously wrong here.”